Speaker Profile: Gabrielle Kelly

Gabrielle Kelly wants South Australia to become the State of Wellbeing. The inaugural Director of the Wellbeing and Resilience Centre at the SAHMRI, her mission is to embed positive psychology and the science of wellbeing and resilience in our community.

Gabrielle has worked on human behaviour and systems change, as a filmmaker, digital media executive and social entrepreneur. She founded the Australian International Documentary Conference to support an industry she sees as crucial to democracy and a healthy, self-aware society.

As the director of the state’s ground-breaking Thinkers in Residence program, Gabrielle implemented change in fields such as city design, advanced manufacturing, early childhood education and positive psychology. As part of this program she commissioned and led Professor Martin Seligman’s Residency, which explored the value of positive psychology in building mental health and resilience, and reducing mental illness.

In her current role, she is implementing Professor Seligman’s challenge for South Australia to become the State of Wellbeing, using his Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment (PERMA+) wellbeing dashboard.

‘Slip Slop Slap’ changed the way generations of Australians thought about sun exposure. Gabrielle Kelly wants PERMA+ to do the same for wellbeing and resilience. At TEDxAdelaide, Gabrielle will consider our need to evolve new capacities to deal with the challenges of global society, and how PERMA+ can be a mechanism for large-scale change in the way we think, feel and behave.